We have a few other biases: We believe that most of us have been deliberately undereducated. Our educational system was designed to make us capable of working within the system. It did not happen by accident.
Our educational system was very deliberately designed to produce people who were competent to be good employees but who did not have the habit of thinking deeply and critically. Thinking and questioning is punished. And after a few years in this system, people give up the habit of asking hard questions and expecting answers.
Hardly anyone who comes out of this system is capable of picking a field of knowledge and mastering it on their own. And if you are capable of learning on your own, you will quickly find out that learning something is not enough.
Unless you have the appropriate certifications, you usually will not get the opportunity to use that knowledge or skill.
Fifty or sixty years ago, a high-school graduate could put on his good clothes, shine his shoes and go knocking on doors. If he was intelligent and courteous, he had a good chance of landing an entry level job. Training came with the job.
Gradually, we moved to an economy where you need a 6-9 month training course for a routine clerical or manual job. Interestingly, this happened about the same time that our high schools were graduating students who could not read, write or make change.
Part of the change came from an attempt to make opportunity available to everyone. We started with scholarships for the academically gifted. Then that was extended to the academically competent. But there wasn't enough money to give everyone a free ride, so it became a combination of scholarships and loans. Then the scholarship money dried up and everyone was allowed to go massively in debt for an education.
Along the way, a trade-school education industry sprang up and lobbied on behalf of the "marginally gifted". Those who were not academically inclined should have an equal chance to get a government backed loan and go into debt at the start of their "careers".
This is a pretty negative point of view. There are a lot of people who got a good job by following the rules as they are today. And these rules provide a kind of security to the person who has invested somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 for an "education". If you picked the right "career path", this educational certification blocks off potential competition. When that didn't work, some areas added "continuing education" and requirements for advanced degrees.
It's hard to argue that education is not a good thing - even if you have audited a junior college social studies course and discovered that the material taught is less rigorous than the material a good primary school used to teach in the sixth grade.
If your "career path" dries up or is outsourced, you have a problem. You have to invest in a new set of certifications to move to any other career. You are blocked by the same kind of certifications that used to protect you, and your intelligence, hard work and skills are devalued by the system.
Opening the doors to opportunity is possible, but it is going to require a deliberate effort on the part of people who know what they are doing and why they are doing it.
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